To the long list of great Italian exports—Ferrari, Cappellini, and San Pellegrino Limonata—it's time to add one more name: Giovanna Mezzogiorno. On a recent visit to New York, the 32–year–old actress from Rome proves strikingly more petite than on screen, though her huge blue–green eyes loom even larger. Already a film star in her native country, Mezzogiorno delivers a bravura performance in her first Hollywood movie, Love in the Time of Cholera, which will be released this month.
[Video: Watch the star steam up Max Vadukul's lens at the Men's Vogue photo shoot]
In person, she carries herself with the posture and deliberate movements of a dancer. Her parents were both celebrated actors—Cecilia Sacchi and the late Vittorio Mezzogiorno—so she originally chose ballet, which she studied for 13 years in Rome. "I thought I was going to be a dancer and teach dance," she explains in an accent that's almost as strong as grappa. Mezzogiorno's acting career began a decade ago on the stage in Paris as a member of Peter Brook's prestigious theater company, which her father had also acted in. Then filmmakers like Gabriele Muccino, who directed her in the Italian hit The Last Kiss, and Mike Newell, who cast her in Cholera opposite Benjamin Bratt and Javier Bardem in her first English–speaking performance, noticed her dramatic prowess. "She has it in her bones," Newell says.
Mezzogiorno couldn't have picked a more difficult role to prove it. The movie is based on Gabriel Garcia Márquez's classic (it took producers three years to convince the –Nobel Prize?winning Colombian writer to sell the rights to a Hollywood studio—for $3 million) and follows a bizarre half–century–long love triangle. To stay faithful to the book, Newell decided to shoot the film largely in the port city of Cartagena, Colombia, where the heat and gravy–thick humidity did a number on the makeup needed for Mezzogiorno's character, Fermina, to age 53 years. Over the course of the love–and–loss tale, she transforms herself from a doe–eyed ingenue who hastily agrees to marriage—on the condition that she doesn't have to eat eggplant—to a fiery old matriarch who calls all the shots. "I would never do that again," she confides. "It's too hard." And what about the final love scene, where Javier Bardem's geriatric Florentino finally takes Fermina for a ride upriver on his steamboat? (Warning: There will be wrinkly nudity.) "I'm not nervous," Mezzogiorno laughs, "but of course I'm the only one who's going to be old and naked and not Javier." She's only half right: It's actually a body double.
Nonetheless, Mezzogiorno is thrilled about the opportunity to seduce Hollywood and the American audience. "I still can't believe I'm in this movie," she says. "Anything can happen." She's committed to all that fate will allow, as long as there's good espresso and the Trevi Fountain nearby. Asked if she could quit Roma for a little Santa Monica, she makes a sour face. "No way!" she says, her eyes growing even larger in mock horror. "For me," she laughs, "Los Angeles is freaky. I try so hard, but I can't get that town."
digg this | add to del.icio.us | add to reddit | add to newsvine
[To discuss this article—or to comment on anything in the magazine or on mensvogue.com—visit the Men's Vogue Forum.]
